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Guy Adams Mess Was Actually a #TwitterFail

In a second essay about his July 29 suspension from Twitter, The Independent LA correspondent Guy Adams hints that things could have been resolved so much more easily:

I was not contacted by NBC or Twitter before my account was suspended. If they had dropped me a line, I might – might! – have quietly deleted the offending tweet. Instead, they wandered into a PR controversy which has resulted in hundreds of thousands more people being made aware of its existence.

It is now also clear that in this ideal scenario, it would have been Twitter contacting the journalist, not NBC. Because as it turns out, it was the little bird that brought the Gary Zenkel email tweet to the attention of The Peacock, not the other way around. Per a report this morning in The Daily Telegraph:

In an email to The Daily Telegraph, Christopher McCloskey, NBC Sports vice-president of communications, said Twitter had actually contacted the network’s social media department to alert them to Mr Adams’ tweets.

“Our social media dept was actually alerted to it by Twitter and then we filled out the form and submitted it,” he wrote. An email asking for further detail and whether this was normal Twitter policy was not returned from NBC or Twitter.

At that point, it would have been nice if NBC had refused to fill out the requested form and instead contacted Adams directly. Still, because NBC did not actually instigate the complaint against the journalist, the network is a little less complicit than the ongoing public Twitter outcry suggests.

Update – 07/31/12: Adams is now back in Twitter business. And in one of his first tweets, he reveals that an email from Twitter says “we have just received an update from the complainant retracting their original request…” So it appears that NBC Sports rescinded the earlier complaint.